Exactly. As BEags says, where is the
need to train Cos to operate in the LHS of the Herc? There is none. The "need" is being driven by a potential cost saving whim of someone further up the food chain.
Yes, we know it's easy to taxy on assy power and starting the engines isn't exactly rocket science, especially on ours. I would suggest 16B though that your comments on use of NWS and rudder etc come from a few years of experience and having a feel for the aircraft? I agree, it is not hard. With experience. I just do not see that can be any benefit gained from training abo copilots to operate the aircraft from the LHS when they have so little experience of operating a large cargo/pax aircraft. Whilst I would be the last person in the world to "big up" (good lord...) the Herc as a difficult aircraft to fly I just see no merit in a such a policy. It's just money saving rubbish. In the same vein why do we bother fitting 4 serviceable engines to the aircraft? We know it'll fly on 2 so think of the savings?!?!?!
I'm not in the business of rubbishing copilots and think that the standard of folk we have today is somewhat better than the window-lickers of yesteryear. If we have to save money (always from our core business though - aircrew training - probably to fund another wing of Abbey Wood....
) then can we not look at it rationally rather than the current "oh it'll be ok"? Counter arguments such as "when did we last ever land on 2 in anger?" hold no water: if that's the line of attack then lets bin the BTR along with ditching drills and wet liferaft drills. I'm sure we could lose a few more too. Think of the savings there! We really could start training for mediocrity properly then
How about his way around it? New pilots are posted in for a 5 year tour. They are told that at any point in that 5 years they can be selected to move across to the LHS as a Captain (and start claiming the hours towards their ATPL, which seems to be the only driving force these days....). Selection for Captain is based on ability and effort.
As it stands at present copilots can just cruise along for 2.5 years doing the bare minimum once a year to get a good annual cat ride. The rest of the time they have no real incentive to work hard or "improve" themselves. If, however, they knew that they could get across to the LHS in, say, a year or even 6 months if they put the effort in then suddenly things change. If they're in competition against their mates for captaincy places every 6 months say (like "competition" for the Tac Cse) then there is suddenly massive incentive for them to put the effort in. Such a system would also allow for experienced operators from other types to quickly transition to the LHS once they had a few months experience of AT ops. There would be no reason why those displaying the potential for the LHS could not start doing the odd sim from the LHS to get a feel for it prior to actually moving across proper.
LHS training could be done in a couple of dedicated sims on Sqn. No captaincy training mind, as this (or the potential for this) would need to be demonstrated for selection to the LHS. Purely a couple of handling Sims, a local training sortie, a training route and then a check. At least by this stage you know that your "stude" in the LHS has enough time on type to have a feel for the aircraft and has already demonstrated his abilities as a copilot.
There are probably holes in the above idea but I suspect they are only big enough to fit a butty box through, unlike the 12 ship you could fly through the holes in the plan being suggested from on high....